wbronitsky

I don't know why I'm responding to the most flippant comment here, but I think your argument, however poorly stated, is worth countering.

"I’m simply stating that the distribution of preferences and abilities of men and women differ in part due to biological causes and that these differences may explain why we don’t see equal representation of women in tech and leadership." - James Damore

I don't think the preceding quote is an "opinion they disagree with" as much as it is pseudo-intellectualism covering up outright hate. This is stated as a fact, not cited and not backed up. It asserts that women are not fit to work at Google, and implies that the women he works with are incompetent because of biology. If your coworker asserted that you were biologically inferior at your job, I think you would take drastic measures as well.

I feel like your last point does not address my criticism. The devs should feel like they have control, not the management, I agree. But my argument is we extend that control to allow devs to pull new tasks into the sprint if they are done.

Sure, you’ll have to explain the optics to management when they ask “how come the devs get to control their own process instead of me,” but with your conviction in the Scrum Master role, I’m sure that wouldn’t be too big of a problem, and would allow for everything you and I are arguing for, right?

I believe many people, including myself, are caught up on the idea of taking "someone else's work". I personally would be much more comfortable with the items you suggest if they either had not been assigned to someone (new or backlog task), or organically offered up (someone says they probably won't get to a task during standup or somesuch).

Additionally, it would seem that you are assuming that the dev is doing something wrong by finishing early and doing nothing, when it seems to me that they are just acting on their incentives. If my incentives are to finish my tickets for the sprint, I'll do just that. Rarely am I incentivized to take others work; I'm not going to get promoted if my co-workers hate me for poaching their tasks. I agree that we should probably find work for said dev, lord knows I also get anxious without work, but the suggestion that we take our teammates work from them is one that many teammates will probably bristle at.

Finally, I have always found the focus on locking the sprint once we plan it a bit absurd. In agile, we acknowledge and even love that the ground under us is shifting constantly. We are always iterating in everything else, so why not the sprint? The idea that I should take others' tasks from them instead of finding something else that I can work on seemingly comes from this myopic focus on frozen sprints.

However, I would assume that is not your view! Maybe you can help me see why a focus on completing the sprint is more important than letting my coworkers do their assigned work. I might be a bit closed minded on this because of my experience, so any thoughts here would help me contextualize this!

The idea that I can add to the productivity of my team by inserting myself into other people's workstream is pretty thoroughly debunked. Not only would I be working out of context, I would force my coworkers to deal with that lack of context and compensate for it while I'm "helping" them. It also shoves my relatively higher productivity into my teammate's face, which is usually demoralizing.

There are many other reasons that this reasoning is misguided, but I'll leave them for now and instead point you to those smarter and better written than I am.

Luckily, there is a ton of writing on this. I'd start with "The Mythical Man Month" which explains that your reasoning is a fallacy with software engineering: https://archive.org/details/mythicalmanmonth00fred

It is absolutely NOT a reference to his homosexuality.

It is a reference for his taste for under-age boys, which seems to be from what I can tell, the reason he lived in Sri Lanka

I did the exact same thing. Can also highly recommend both. The beginning of the Clarke book was more interesting to me because it was a broader history of laying cable. The second half is more of a personal history of comsats, which, while interesting, goes a bit far into Clarke’s life while leaving out the nasty bits he is known for.

Worth reading either way!

I find comments like these, which boil down to “stop complaining and hack a solution already” to reinforce the problem identified by TFA, which is that context matters. I feel like OP has elided that fact; the context is that a hacked up solution was acceptable here. That is not always the case, and sidesteps the point that context is king

But they all challenge why he would make these points, which to me is valid criticism. Is it not?

Are you arguing that it isn’t relevant that he owns or sits on the board of direct competitors to Google, one of which works in the very space he is commenting on? Or just that I should not question the context of his arguments? Or something else entirely?

I’m not sure why you lobbed this attack. One can seemingly question the context and motives of calling a company “treasonous” without being dismissed out of hand

Another valid point, but my point is not that he is a dual citizen, it is that he gained his citizenship in NZ to hedge against catastrophe in the US, and is now calling on the US government, which he does not trust to avert catastrophe, to solve his business problems for him

Very true and I didn’t mean to say otherwise. There is nothing wrong about being a citizen of more than one country.

I’m trying to point out that Thiel doesn’t actually trust the US government and he is making an argument in bad faith to serve his personal interests, not those of other US citizens

Google is a direct competitor to Facebook in the Ad space.

Google is a direct competitor to Palantir in the Defense space.

I’m sure he is worried about the latter, as they can test the infra with the Chinese, then sell it to the Americans, in some not too far off future.

Remember, we have always been at war with Eurasia. Or was it Eastasia?

So a guy who sits on the FB board and runs his own US defense contracting company says the US Government should investigate the direct competitor of his companies, after donating large sums of money to the campaign of the current US President.

A person who has so much faith in the US government that he has purchased citizenship in New Zeland.

A person who has questioned the US 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

Why should we listen to him?

Kyle used to work at Stripe and left. I don’t think he would come back unfortunately. That guy is absolutely amazing, especially with regards to distributes DBs and writing about them

I think you find your question offensive because it is poorly framed. I think a much better question is “what is wrong with our mental health infrastructure in America? Why is it so awful that we feel we must ask what is wrong with the mentally ill?”

To your point at not seeing mentally ill people in poor societies: I bet if you really follow this logic, you can figure out where these people are in those societies. Jail, other captive institutions, too ill to be in public, violence, institutional or personal, and death are all valid

Why are you continuing to hammer away with the Reddit style comments? You might have a good point, but now you are acting like an argumentative ass.

This isn't some sort of internet pissing contest with people you don't know and will never meet; that is literally any other online forum that I've seen. This is a forum to discuss issues with people who are interested in them. You are purposefully diluting the conversation, and for what? The lolz?

Go somewhere else with this crap

What’s with the unnecessary pedantry here? It is getting exhausting to see people on HN constantly resorting to common denominator pedantry

We know it works because we have examples. It is quite frustrating to see you not even try to go and get those examples. It only takes a simple google search.

Here are three good ones: the UK, Japan and Canada. All different systems, all providing medical care for much less cost than we do in the US.

Additionally, your reasoning is flawed at best. The government can legislate that providers can only charge $x for y service, which private actors cannot. 300 million+ people is a very large market to leave just because you are slipping on profits. There are many other levers a single payer who is the government can pull as well.

Oh come on. This has got to be a bad faith argument.

Most of us either choose the lowest cost option on the public market that suits our needs for emergency care or take our employers options, of which there are one or two. Even if you had previously made a choice, which again is not something most people can or want to do, when an emergency happens, it’s an emergency! You will have to be taken somewhere.

There are many times when an ER is full, you are outside of your home area, maybe just traffic, that would push you to another hospital in an emergency. Your argument is not only poorly made, I find it hysterically obtuse. Most people don’t want to get to or even have to choose their damned emergency care. To assert otherwise is disingenuous

Please stop with the reddit comments. You can so so so easily post the information here instead of being pompous about it.

You seemingly just argued for planting more trees, in that if we did not try and replace the trees being cut down, we would have a negative growth rate of trees, which seems much worse than 0 growth rate. I’m not sure why you dismissed out of hand the argument, as it only took a hot second do deduce that it’s actually a good thing.

“Ah yes, all of them. Every politician in a place where millions live is bad, none of them are working to build housing and schools, transit and infrastructure.”

That’s a horrible argument that has no basis in fact. Multiple cities, like Mountain View, Oakland, San Jose and Foster City, just to name a few off the top of my head, are putting in affordable housing. Alameda County Transit has vastly expanded their bus fleet, something the tax payers chose on the ballot!

You might hate your elected officials, but not all of us do.

Wow, I had no idea HN had become Reddit. To celebrate, I’ll also leave a reddit style comment!

I'd also add "be pedantic, but use enough words to not be trite" but that would be a bit pedantic without being trite

Came here to literally type "he didn't" thank you for doing it first!

I agree. There is no coherent analysis of how to actually enable this, and what the real pros and cons are. The article also assumes that you have the same order of frontends and services, which is a weak assumption, and that branding, style and design coherency are not important parts of a frontend experience, which is even weaker. This is an incredibly lame argument for any system. I expect a whole lot better from Fowler's blog

And I don’t get what you’re on about!

This comment is amazingly emblematic of how shitty and toxic the comments have gotten on this site. You dismiss outright the story of someone you could easily research, all for some pet pity party for some Google exec? Not only is this incredibly lazy rhetoric but it serves literally zero purpose other than to make you feel good about not understanding the reasons other people make decisions.

Exactly what point are you making here?

Wow, downvoted for pointing out the shitty tenor of conversation on this site. I don't know why I participate any more

You might have a good point, but why present it in this way? It is needlessly condescending and makes people want to not believe you. You could have easily stated your case for how much utility and adoption you think this will have without looking down your nose at people who hold a different opinion.

Comments like this devalue the entire conversation being had here by pushing people either towards twitter style shitposting/flamewars, which are terrible ways to have conversations, or simply causing those who would like to comment to not engage. Either way, can you not?

Why is it tired? Because you don’t agree with it?

I would argue that your comment is the bad comment. Lots of unproven assertions, and it all began with a needless, toxic attack